Now that this blog's enforced downtime is out of the way, I'm going to begin a series of posts covering the last days of Christ through from Lent to his crucifixion, resurrection and ascention. This is my first Easter since becoming serious about Christianity, and you can expect to see more reportage of religion in these parts in future.

What was the answer to the following question, asked at the Cole Inquiry on Thursday:

MR AGIUS: Q. Prime Minister, your full name is John Winston Howard?

Was it:
(a) "It is."
(b) "I have no recollection of that."
(c) "Disclosure of my identity would be a threat to national security."
(d) "No that was the last bloke, I'm Peter Costello."

Answer at this end of this article.

After the agony of Mark Vaile's amnesia on Monday, and the slapstick buffoonery of Alexander Downer's arrival for Tuesday's hearing via the Sydney monorail, we had an appearance by the Prime Minister on Thursday so perfectly choreographed that Ric Birch could not have staged it better.

From his morning power walk, to the triumphal front-door entrance to the courthouse, phalanxed by the usual crowd of security bovver boys, to the meticulously crafted answers under John Agius QC's unusually powder-puff questioning, it was all predictable. And irrelevant.

Howard calls this inquiry "transparent". It's not. He set it up basically as a set-up, to investigate the conduct of companies directly implicated in the oil-for-food scandal. But not into a government under whose watch it all happened.

AWB's reputation is in ruins and several of its executives have quit, some of them likely to spend their retirement years in custodial accommodation. Other companies, including BHP Billiton, are likely to get their wrists slapped.

However, the conduct of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and its "responsible" ministers are not accountable to the Cole inquiry under its existing terms of reference. Thanks to JWH's carefully-worded terms for the inquiry, there can be no findings made in respect to the government's role in this mess.

DFAT's culture appears little different to that of the Immigration Department and that of the Attorney-General's Department - a dangerous cocktail of slackness, "whatever it takes", and reactionary ideological bias. The responsibility for all this rests solely with the man who rules his cabinet with an iron fist.

Every day I have more and more trouble understanding why anyone could think John Howard is a good prime minister.

In any decent Westminster-based democracy, the responsible ministers, and possibly the government as a whole, would have fallen on their swords by now. Howard has torn up the Westminster system in Canberra, made a mockery of the concept of ministerial responibility, and made selective amnesia an essential part of the job description for any politician or senior company executive. And, quite separately to all this, he is systematically dismantling democracy in this country.

Howard's legacy to Australia is that he has turned impropriety and deceipt into acceptable "Australian values", and made decency subservient to wealth accumulation and ideological jihad.

Don't rule out a snap early federal election some time in 2006.

David Marr and Marian Wilkinson's brilliant dissection of the AWB story so far appears in today's Sydney Morning Herald. All the hearing transcripts can be found on the Attorney-General Department's website.

(The correct answer was (a). As boring as the man himself.)

After his heroic backs-to-the-wall matchwinning knock to get Australia out of jail against cricketing powerhouse Bangladesh, there is a question begging to be asked of Ponting comma RT full stop:

In the only suitable fashion.

No play before lunch, rain
Marylebone Cricket Club v Nottinghamshire at Lord's, 14-17 Apr 2006

Almost a fortnight of the most unbelievable comedy of errors is over, as I have left my previous hosting service for hopefully greener pastures.

Some catching up on blogging to do. Goodness me, the English domestic season starts in a few minutes!

(Update: I've managed to recover a couple of blog entries posted between the most recent backup and the final crash. Google's cache is good for something after all!)

Links to Good Friday messages from notable church leaders:

It’s official. The Surrey Lions are no more. From this season onwards, the Surrey CCC limited-over team will be known as the Surrey Brown Caps.

Why? Because, funnily enough, they wear brown caps.

Which, of course, explains the colour of the Surrey training shirt that I bought at The Oval in 2000 (picture at right)

Surreycricket.com has the official story.

This website is back in action after approximately 40 hours off the air. Initially described to me by my host’s tech support as a GRUB issue, it finally involved a complete reloading of the operating system followed by a complete reload of the configurations and data on every hosted account on mulroney (yep, my provider has named all their servers after Canadian prime ministers).

You don’t have to swear at the football and eat a pie to be an Australian, but you do have to believe in democracy, the rule of law and the rights and liberties of others…. Where we have reason to believe that people are not truthfully or honestly meeting that test, we have every right to deny them citizenship, or if by subsequent conduct they show that they don’t meet the test, then we could invite them to forfeit their Australian citizenship.

wet·land (wtlnd)
n. A lowland area, such as a marsh or swamp, that is saturated with moisture, especially when regarded as the natural habitat of wildlife
(Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition via Dictionary.com)

Unless, of course, you are in the U S of A where, it seems, the Department of Interior considers any wet lands to be wetlands.

Especially if they are water hazards on golf courses. Or even puddles.

The St Petersburg Times in Florida picks up the story, and check out the Department of Interior's official line.